Many have talked about doing this, some have even prototyped pieces of it, but these undergrad college students pulled it off. This is the result from Prof. ‘Leo’ Liu’s full-semester senior design course based on the MIT Coffee Can radar short course, which has been going on for 2 years now. Next year this course will have 30 students, showing the world the interest and market-for project based learning.

Check out the high res ranging demo, where a wider band chirp was used to amazing results. Video below.

RF radiation at this level isn’t going to do anything to you. It’s a myth about cops and testicular cancer and traffic enforcement radar. On a larger radar with much higher output power, kilowatts on up you might get thermal injuries and cataracts due to tissue heating, since radar typically works at microwave frequencies and work pretty much the same way as your microwave oven, though the guts may not be just a simple magnatron like in an oven. This is non-ionizing radation and does not emmit “rays” like as in x-rays or gama rays.